Testing is a critical component in the development of software. Testing is the process of validating and verifying that a software program, application, or product meets the business and technical requirements that guided its design and development, works as expected, and can be implemented with the same characteristics.
Some software development tools help automate testing by recording tests that are run, allowing “playback” of the test routines. However, an entire test routine is rarely, if ever, applicable to more than one release of one application. Data-driven testing adds some modularity by keeping test input and output values separate from the test procedure, but the procedure itself is still in a single script. Keyword-driven testing breaks the test procedure into logical components that can then be used repeatedly in the assembly of new test scripts. Keyword driven testing separated much of the programming work of test automation from the actual test design, allowing tests to be developed earlier and making the tests easier to maintain.
Tools such as keyword driven testing allows such business analysts earlier in the testing process. Every software product has a target audience. For example, the audience for video game software is completely different from banking software. An organization's business analysts may have a deep understanding of the target audience, but very little programming knowledge.
Keyword driven testing is useful, but applications can easily require thousands of automation keywords to be developed and used. Navigating, constructing and maintaining test scripts based on thousands of keywords are cumbersome.
Computer scientists attempt to keep track of the behavior of systems through tools such as state diagrams. However, state diagrams require the creation of distinct nodes for every valid combination of parameters that define the state, leading to a very large number of nodes and transitions between nodes for all but the simplest of systems (the “state and transition explosion problem”). While UML state diagrams and Harel state charts try to solve the state and transition explosion problem by providing complex formalisms like hierarchical nested states, orthogonal regions, entry and exit actions, and internal transitions, their complexity is inappropriate for the problem of modeling test script navigation for graphical user interface (“GUI”) applications. Even with advanced state diagrams and state charts, it remains cumbersome to understand the interrelationship as well as to maintain changes in the framework from both a structuring as well as a navigation aspect.
There are continuing efforts to improve automated testing.